Most people do not understand that Hydrogen, due to it's inherent instability and desire to chemically change in a volatile manner, is simply an anergy storing devices. Hydrogen is not very energy dense. Understanding it's role is important to determining whether or not to us it as it essentially acts as a battery. If you have X units of energy (electricity), the key question is how many units will you get back out of the hydrogen. So far most the most advanced systems have show that Energy in (Ei) has an Energy out (Eo) roughly equal to Eo = Ei/10. Not anywhere near as efficient as a lithium ion battery. Even lead acid batteries have better performance.

nickull writes: "SXSW is a popular conference amongst many in the tech culture. While the mix of technology, art, film and music fun all seems fine on the surface, a closer look reveals how SXSW actively takes money from musicians via SonicBids, charging them to apply to play at the festival in an un-transparent lottery. This practice needs to be exposed and discussed to ensure fair trade extends to musicians at technology events."

So I was tasked with writing an open source Android application for mobile and decided to write a Slashdot RSS monitor to keep updated with the latest from Slashdot. The app is in the Android marketplace and the complete source code and video tutorials are available (Just hit the info button on the application). So far no bugs and it has 5/5 star rating. Size = 768 kb which includes 450 kb of graphics so if you want a leaner app, you can take the source and pare it down yourself. Open license

nickull writes: So I was tasked with writing an open source Android application for mobile and decided to write a Slashdot RSS monitor to keep updated with the latest from Slashdot. The app is in the Android marketplace and the complete source code and video tutorials are available (Just hit the info button on the application). So far no bugs and it has 5/5 star rating. Size = 768 kb which includes 450 kb of graphics so if you want a leaner app, you can take the source and pare it down yourself. Open license — do what you want.

I guess people are worried that our state of the art igloo geometric designs, dogsled aerodymanics and maple syrup chemistry are in danger if poltical decisions are made without the benefit of science. Luckily there are only 78 of us in the whole country. We can probably sort it out in about a fortnight over a few Molson's beers while watching ice hockey.
duane
"Who won the damn gold medals at the last Olympics anyways?"

nickull writes: Several news sites have reported a developing story of the Libyan government seizing *.ly domain names such as vb.ly for violating Sharia law. The Washington Post reports that "Bit.ly, Owl.ly, Vb.ly: adorably named URL shortening services have skyrocketed in popularity thanks to microblogging sites such as Twitter, where every character counts. But the owner of one URL shortener thinks the.ly party is coming to an end." IANA, the authority regulating country code top level domains (ccTLD) assigns a trustee for each sovereign state which makes the Libyan trustee perfectly within their legal rights to sieze such domains.

Because there are lots of us who work at Adobe who have been very vocal internally about ensuring that Linux is a first class O/S and released at the same time as the other O/S's. That is why Linux is getting the 64 bit Flash Player. More and more of us are using Ubuntu and RHEL on the server (our enterprise ESB uses RHEL/(WebSphere || Weblogic || JBoss) as a reference implementation!).
Now if we could only talk our bosses into CS5 for Linux.....

nickull writes: Several industry giants (60 as of July 20) have joined together to form a consortium and build out additional functionality for the consumer digital experience. The core goal is to allow more consumer freedom, recognizing that consumers of the future may want to render their digital streams on more than one device, such as smartphones, laptops, TV's and tablets. The technology, called Ultraviolet, is claimed to make CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs all work the same way on a vast array of devices of every size, shape and price range. Despite RIAA involvement, on the surface the consortium seem to be relaxing constraints against copying. The quote from the website "Buying an UltraViolet title will mean a consumer can make multiple copies to their family’s registered UltraViolet devices" probably indicates that some form of hardware locked DRM will be employed to prevent unauthorized use while consumers are free to make backup copies. Notable is that Apple is absent.

Agreed. We have been moving in this direction with the open screen project. My goal is to have the SWF format as open as PDF one day but there are a few hurdles. If we did it today, it would break backwards compatibility (bad). Many of us at Adobe believe we should not be a standards development org as we really don't own it (the community owns it). We just filter feature requests and build the reference implementation. Some of the components we open sourced (Tamarin) and many of the specs are published such as RTMP, AMF. I hope we get there one day. THanks for the input. We actually do listen and appreciate this type of feedback.

YOu could say you are also forced to use a browser then. You have a choice. If you want to see certain sites in their entirety, you can choose flash. If you want to experience only the text, use wget. If you want to see something in between, use a browser.
your choice. There are still some old guys who don't even like to load images and only read the alt text. Can't make everyone happy so giving people choice is the only path we can take.

I am lighting fires under the PM's for this every day (I work for Adobe). There are many of us here that want support for 64 bit linux. You guys have every right to be whiny about this. I bitch about it myself. THere are Duane Nickull dartboards on more than one Flash Player engineers door. Keep up the pressure. - DN

Kenja is correct. You do not have to have it. YOu can choose other technologies. Adobe (which I work for) is all about choice. Anyways, I posted a couple of videos showing some of the experiences of Flash on the Android powered Nexus 1 phone. The experience is actually quite amazing.

nickull writes: As reported via Apple Insider, Apple has allegedly updated its iPhone 4.0 SDK developer program license agreement to specifically prohibit developers form using any dev framework that is not born of Apple. The specific text is rumored to be "3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).". Of course I cannot attest to this because Apple also has an agreement banning developers who get their SDK from publicly commenting on the terms within the SDK so I am just guessing.

If true, this could affect many development frameworks and systems including many open source alternatives like PhoneGap.

you are right. The way Flash (the swf format only, not the whole platform) was written circa 2003, it wasn't optimized to go to mobile devices. There were some issues and technical hurdles to get around. Some of them were simple (like stopping FP instances that are not in the visible part of the screen) or simply reducing the frame rates of flash applications that are using battery power when they are not in focus). Some required much more thinking such as form fields receiving focus when the tab is hit from an HTML form element above a flash form element). To scale to mobile was a challenge which has been met with the Flash PLayer 10.1. The Google Nexus 1 phone (which I own) does a great job of running the full version of Flash (not Flash Lite). The FP 10.1 has *huge* technical improvements from previous versions
Adobe is full on excited about HTML 5 too. There are some really cool possibilities about using HTML 5 features side by side with Flash. Serge Jespers did a great job of showing this on his blog late last week:
http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/03/05/the-html5-flash-marriage-geolocation/
The fact is that HTML being updated is not something everyone asked for, but in it's execution, there are some obvious features that I am glad to see such as the Video element. I do share some concerns about how more advanced API's get implemented (such as the document.evaluate(); API) for complex XSLT processing but hope the industry will figure it out.
DN
" any technology can be used for good or for evil. The only question is how you decide to use your coding time in between " - Gandalf